The EU's foreign policy chief has said member states are not willing to give her what it takes for major reform of the European External Action Service (EEAS). Speaking to MEPs in Strasbourg on Wednesday (12 June), ...

EU countries are legally free to ship arms to Syria from 1 June in an ugly compromise after 14 hours of talks in Brussels. The deal is to see all other sanctions - including visa bans, asset freezes and a prohibition on ...

A plan to cut spending on IT security in the EU diplomatic corps is causing concern among officials who handle classified files. According to the European External Action Service's (EEAS) draft budget for 2014, seen by ...

Nato head Anders Fogh Rasmussen has said there cannot be a credible EU foreign policy without the military means to back it up. "We Europeans must understand that soft power alone is really no power at all. Without hard ...

The EU diplomatic service has confirmed that British company Page Protective Services (PPS) will guard its people in Gaza and the West Bank despite the firm's poor track record. A note published on the EU's Tenders ...

The EU diplomatic service is to pay €15 million extra in wages next year, but to make deep cuts on security. Its draft 2014 budget - circulated internally on 3 April and seen by EUobserver - says it is "fully aware of ...

EU diplomats work in some of the world's most dangerous places. The men who guard them cost up to €17,000 each a month. But are they worth the money? Are the diplomats safe? Does the EU award the contracts fairly? Two ...

EUobserver's look at private security firms is the latest in its series of investigative reports. Our investigations aim to take a critical look at events behind the scenes in EU institutions and EU capitals, or to ...

“As you can see, I have no electricity at home at this moment,” says Yousef via Skype. “I have a fuel generator that I can use during the power cuts. If I run out of fuel, like now, I have a transformer connected to a ...

Serbia is to get a date for EU accession talks, Kosovo is to get some control over its north and EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton got kudos after a breakthrough in Kosovo-Serbia talks. The deal in Brussels on ...

Catherine Ashton's EU foreign service recently gave its biggest security contract to a company with a frightening track record. Then they took it away again, posing questions on the professionalism of her staff. Ashton' ...

Looking beyond the next round of negotiations in April in Kazakhstan, the EU should formulate a strategic approach towards Iran. In its approach towards Iran, the EU employs the so-called twin-track method. On one hand, ...

Seventeen men and women directly accused of murder, torture, rape or kidnapping in Zimbabwe have been given the green light to travel to the EU. The names feature on a list of 81 people and eight companies taken off the ...

France has called for the EU foreign service to hire a new cadre of security experts and to create consular departments in its overseas embassies. It put forward its ideas in two non-papers, seen by EUobserver, which ...

EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton has said she will step down next year, noting that she is tired of all the travel. Speaking at a debate in Brussels on Saturday (16 March) organised by the German Marshall Fund, ...

Germany has proposed giving the EU's foreign service sweeping new powers over neighbourhood policy and development aid. Its ideas are to be discussed by EU foreign ministers at a meeting in Dublin on Friday (22 March). ...

EU council chief Herman Van Rompuy on Sunday (17 March) said he will retire from politics when his mandate ends next year. "At the end of 2014, it's the end of my political career," the former Belgian prime minister ...

British leader David Cameron has said he might send arms to rebels in Syria whether fellow EU countries like it or not. Speaking to the House of Commons liaison committee on Tuesday (12 March), he said: "I would like to ...

Two years since its creation, the European External Action Service (EEAS), supposedly the EU’s foreign policy engine, is about to face a review. Some will ask: "again?" and work against the risk that the review opens a ...

The EU and US have called on Iran to free opposition leaders ahead of elections in June. Iranian security services put Mehdi Karroubi, Hossein Mousavi and his wife, Zahra Rahnavard, under house arrest on 14 February ...

It is always the big states that make the headlines in EU policy making. The start of 2013 has been no different on this front, from Germany’s austerity drive; to France’s intervention in Mali or Britain’s announcement ...

President Francois Hollande has said French troops in Mali are there to do much more than stopping rebels from taking Bamako. The French leader told press on a visit to Abu Dhabi on Tuesday (15 January) that: "We have ...

European Parliament head Martin Schulz has accused EU foreign relations chief Catherine Ashton of "disrespect" over an agenda problem. Speaking at the opening of the session in Strasbourg on Monday (14 January), he said ...

Perspectives for a European security strategy towards Asia: Views from Asia, Europe and the US. By Gustaaf Geeraerts and Eva Cross (eds.). VUBPress; 309 pages; €37.74 (excl. VAT and shipping) at EUbookshop.com. As one ...

On Tuesday (6 November) America goes to the polls, with President Barack Obama and his Republican challenger Mitt Romney still in a statistical dead-heat. Millions of Europeans will stay up until the early hours of ...

EU officials weary of being sniped at for their handling of the crisis or their big salaries got a morale boost on Friday (12 October) when the five people on the Nobel Peace Prize committee in Norway gave the world's ...

The European Commission has said Albania, Kosovo and Macedonia should take steps forward in their bids to join the EU. Its annual enlargement report out on Wednesday (10 October) recommended that member states should ...

Srebrenica was not genocide and Serbia will not bow to demands for Kosovo recognition, Serbia's leader has said on the eve of a key EU report. The Balkan country's head of state, Tomislav Nikolic, a former confidante of ...

Brussels on Thursday (4 October) gave Belgrade a tongue-lashing on gay rights, but the issue is unlikely to decide when Serbia can start EU entry talks. Peter Stano, the spokesman for enlargement commissioner Stefan ...

EU ministers in New York have said new sanctions on Iran are the antidote to an Iran-Israel war. Speaking to press in the margins of the UN's annual meeting, the foreign ministers of France, Germany and the UK said the ...

EU countries have a protocol for sharing official "secrets." But people's motives for classifying EU files are not always pure and the number of really hush hush papers in Brussels is tiny. The EU Council - where member ...

Chinese leader Wen Jiabao has bluntly told the EU to drop its ban on arms sales. He made the call in his opening remarks to top EU officials Herman Van Rompuy and Jose Manuel Barroso at a summit in a stately home in ...

China is "disappointed" and the European Commission feels "regret" before the EU-China summit has even begun. The prickly remarks before the top-level meeting in Brussels on Thursday (20 September) came after a ...

As tensions rise between Asia’s economic giants, China and Japan, over a small group of uninhabited mini-islands in the East China Sea, reaction from the EU remains conspicuous by its absence. The world’s second and ...

A brainstorming group of 11 foreign ministers has called for a more powerful EU foreign policy chief and less power in general for EU countries. The group - containing ministers from Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, ...

With Belgium's spy-catcher-in-chief, the VSSE's Alain Winants, speaking out to international media about espionage in the EU capital, TargetBRUSSELS and EUobserver profile the cases that came out in the open in recent ...

A mere two weeks ago the name Ramil Safarov was meaningless to most people. Today he is the cause of a diplomatic storm between Azerbaijan, Armenia and Hungary which has sucked in the US, Russia and the EU and deepened ...

"I stopped meeting him for lunch because all he did was ask questions and he never said anything about himself," a diplomat on the EU Council's working group for post-Soviet countries once told this website about his ...

EUobserver: In what way does the VSSE co-operate with the EU institutions and Nato? Alain Winants: Belgium hosts the institutions of two major international bodies - the EU and Nato, which is a great privilege but it's ...

Denmark is fronting an EU initiative to help consumers boycott Israeli settlement products. Its foreign ministry is funding an event in Brussels on 23 October to get EU diplomats and NGOs, such as Oxfam and Crisis ...

Egyptian leader Mohamed Morsi invoked the Koran while promising to protect visitors to Egypt after the killing of US officials in Libya. Speaking in Brussels with European Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso on ...

The EU's foreign service is considering whether to temporarily close its office in Benghazi after the killing of the US ambassador to Libya in the city on Tuesday (11 September). The small EU unit, a secure building ...

Russian President Vladimir Putin has passed a law blocking Gazprom from normal co-operation with EU anti-trust officials. Referring to potential EU-Gazprom exchange of information on alleged price-fixing, his new decree ...

Kosovo's foreign minister has said the end of supervised independence should make Serbia realise it can never divide Kosovo or get it back. Speaking to EUobserver from Pristina on Sunday (9 September), ahead of ...

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has told Italy's foreign minister the EU should designate Hezbollah as a terrorist entity. But EU diplomats are wary of the move. "There is one ... effort that I think Europe ...

European Commission head Jose Manuel Barroso has said EU ambassadors need "economic briefings" to help tell the outside world what the bloc is doing to fight the crisis. Speaking at a yearly heads of delegation meeting ...

Eight days after the EU pledged €19.5 million to reform Azerbaijan's justice and migration systems, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has signed a decree pardoning Ramil Safarov, sentenced in 2006 by the court of an EU ...

EU countries have criticised "strategic partner" Azerbaijan for making a national hero out of an axe-murderer. On 19 February 2004 during a Nato seminar at a military school in Budapest, he walked into the bedroom of a ...

In the frying pan of sultry Kyiv, the political temperature has also reached unusual heights for summer. After months of speculation, all the major political camps have made public their lists of candidates for ...